Great question. I was very concerned about that, too. I strongly recommend learning Domain Driven Design before diving into Spring, you will recognize a lot of patterns and it then makes sense how things work. Even things like having an interface + an implementation for basically everything becomes apparent. I had a lot of bad experience with Spring and Jakarta EE in the past, but I can assure you Spring Boot does a fantastic job here.

Point being, it is an enterprise setup and in enterprise applications you favor maintainability and friends over speed of development. So implementing a feature takes more files and more time, in a DDD setup you can estimate something like 1 controller method, use case + interface, >=2 DTOs, potentially a domain model if not present plus a repository + interface if not present.

So yes, it is more overhead and you have a slow down in productivity. I have no proof, but I am 95% sure that the time you save upfront in a more flexible environment like node is being paid back significantly worse when it comes to maintenance.

Edit: you can of course use Spring Boot without enterprise/DDD and hence make it simpler. It's actually pretty minimal.